Search results for ""University of Alabama Press""

This groundbreaking volume explores the importance of economics and prosperity throughout Samuel Clemens’s writing and personal life.Mark Twain and Money: Language, Capital, and Culture focuses on an overlooked feature of the story of one of America’s most celebrated writers. Investigating Samuel Clemens’s often conflicting but insightful views on the roles of money in American culture and identity, this collection of essays shows how his fascination with the complexity of nineteenth-century economics informs much of Mark Twain’s writing. While most readers are familiar with Mark Twain the worldly wise writer, fewer are acquainted with Samuel Clemens the avid businessman. Throughout his life, he sought to strike it rich, whether mining for silver in Nevada, founding his own publishing company, or staking out ownership in the Paige typesetting machine. He was ever on the lookout for investment schemes and was intrigued by inventions, his own and those of others, that he imagined would net a windfall. Conventional wisdom has held that Clemens’s obsession with business and material wealth hindered his ability to write more and better books. However, this perspective fails to recognize how his interest in economics served as a rich source of inspiration for his literary creativity and is inseparable from his achievements as a writer. In fact, without this preoccupation with monetary success, Henry B. Wonham and Lawrence Howe argue, Twain’s writing would lack an important connection to a cornerstone of American culture. The contributors to this volume examine a variety of topics, such as a Clemens family myth of vast landholdings, Clemens’s strategies for protecting the Mark Twain brand, his insights into rapidly evolving nineteenth-century financial practices, the persistence of patronage in the literary marketplace, the association of manhood and monetary success, Clemens’s attitude and actions toward poverty, his response to the pains of bankruptcy through writing, and the intersection of racial identity and economics in American culture. These illuminating essays show how pecuniary matters invigorate a wide range of Twain’s writing from The Gilded Age, Roughing It,The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Prince and the Pauper, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, to later stories like “The £1,000,000 Banknote” and the Autobiography.

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A carefully rendered portrait of a brilliant but troubled daughter of the Old South who struggled against the conventions of gender, class, family, and ultimately of sanity, yet survived to define a creative life of her own Sara Mayfield was born into Alabama’s governing elite in 1905 and grew up in a social circle that included Zelda Sayre, Sara Haardt, and Tallulah and Eugenia Bankhead. After winning a Goucher College short story contest judged by H. L. Mencken, Mayfield became friends with Mencken and his circle, then visited with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and hobnobbed with the literati while traveling in Europe after a failed marriage. Returning to Alabama during the Depression, she briefly managed the family landholdings before departing for New York City where she became involved in the theater. Inventing a plastic compound while working on theatrical sets, she applied for a patent and set her sights on a livelihood as an inventor and businesswoman. With the advent of World War II, Mayfield returned to her family home in Tuscaloosa where she expanded her experiments, freelanced as a journalist, and doggedly pursued a bizarre series of military and intelligence schemes, prompting temporary hospitalization. In 1945, she mingled with a host of cultural figures, including Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth, and even a young John F. Kennedy, while reporting on the creation of the United Nations from Mexico and California. Back in Tuscaloosa after the war, however, she struggled to find her way with both work and family, becoming increasingly paranoid about perceived conspiracies arrayed against her. Finally, her mother and brother committed her to Bryce Hospital for the Insane, where she remained for the next seventeen years. Throughout her life, Mayfield kept journals, wrote fiction, and produced thousands of letters while nursing the ambition that had driven her since childhood: to write and publish books. During her confinement, Mayfield assiduously recorded her experiences and her determined efforts—sometimes delusional, always savvy—to overturn her diagnosis and return to the world as a sane, independent adult. At 59, she was released from Bryce and later obtained a decree of “having been restored to sanity,” enabling her to manage her own financial affairs and to live how and where she pleased. She went on to publish noteworthy literary biographies of the Menckens and the Fitzgeralds plus a novel based on the life of Mona Lisa, finally achieving her quest to become the author of books and her own life. In Odyssey of a Wandering Mind, noted writer Jennifer Horne draws on years of research and an intimate understanding of the vast archive Sara Mayfield left behind to sensitively render Mayfield’s struggle to move through the world as the person she was—and her ultimate success in surviving to define the terms of her story.

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Details the abolition of the slave trade in the Atlantic World to the 1860s.Throughout the nineteenth century, very few people in Spain campaigned to stop the slave trade and did even less to abolish slavery. Even when some supported abolition, the reasons that moved them were not always humanitarian, liberal, or egalitarian. How abolitionist ideas were received, shaped, and transformed during this period has been ripe for study. Jesús Sanjurjo’s In the Blood of Our Brothers: Abolitionism and the End of the Slave Trade in Spain’s Atlantic Empire, 1800–1870 provides a comprehensive theory of the history, the politics, and the economics of the persistence and growth of the slave trade in the Spanish empire even as other countries moved toward abolition.Sanjurjo privileges the central role that British activists and diplomats played in advancing the abolitionist cause in Spain. In so doing, he brings to attention the complex and uneven development of abolitionist and antiabolitionist discourses in Spain’s public life, from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the end of the transatlantic trade. His delineation of the ideological and political tension between Spanish liberalism and imperialism is crucial to formulating a fuller explanation of the reasons for the failure of anti–slave trade initiatives from 1811 to the 1860s. Slave trade was tied to the notion of inviolable property rights, and slavery persisted and peaked following three successful liberal revolutions in Spain.

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Offers a deeply researched epic family biography that reflects the complicated and evolving world inhabited by three generations of the extremely accomplished - if problematic - Bankhead family of northwest Alabama. Kari Frederickson's expertly crafted account traces the careers of five members of the family.

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Posits that contemporary Brazil is a settler colony. Based on ethnographic research and her experiences growing up in Brazil, the author tells the stories of communities in Rio de Janeiro, SÃo Paulo, and Belo Horizonte.

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Offers a deeply considered examination of the ways fear figures in First Amendment questions ruled on by the contemporary Supreme Court. Bringing together literature on theories of fear in rhetorical and philosophical traditions, the authors focus on the rulings from the Roberts Court, which form a pivotal era of dramatic precedents.

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Provides case studies of social dynamics and evolution of ring-shaped communities of the Eastern Woodlands.

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To understand Alabama today, it's necessary to understand what happened in 1865. In 1865 Alabama Christopher McIlwain examines the end of the Civil War and the early days of Reconstruction, tracing how the actionand inactionof leaders during those twelve months shaped the decades that followed as well as state politics today.

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Orthodox Judaism is one of the fastest-growing religious communities in contemporary American life. Anyone who wishes to understand more about Judaism in America will need to consider the tenets and practices of Orthodox Judaism: who its adherents are, what they believe in, what motivates them, and to whom they turn for moral, intellectual, and spiritual guidance.Among those spiritual leaders none looms larger than Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, heir to the legendary Talmudic dynasty of Brisk and a teacher and ordainer of thousands of rabbis during his time as a Talmud teacher at Yeshiva University from the Second World War until the 1980s. Soloveitchik was not only a Talmudic authority but a scholar of Western philosophy. While many books and articles have been written about Soloveitchik’s legacy and his influence on American Orthodoxy, few have looked carefully at his disciples in Torah and Talmud study, and even fewer at his disciples in Jewish thought and philosophy.Soloveitchik’s Children: Irving Greenberg, David Hartman, Jonathan Sacks, and the Future of Jewish Theology in America is the first book to study closely three of Soloveitchik’s major disciples in Jewish thought and philosophy: Rabbis Irving (“Yitz”) Greenberg, David Hartman, and Jonathan Sacks. Daniel Ross Goodman narrates how each of these three major modern Jewish thinkers learned from and adapted Soloveitchik’s teachings in their own ways, even while advancing his philosophical and theological legacy.The story of religious life and Judaism in contemporary America is incomplete without an understanding of how three of the most consequential Jewish thinkers of this generation adapted the teachings of one of the most consequential Jewish thinkers of the previous generation. Soloveitchik’s Children tells this gripping intellectual and religious story in a learned and engaging manner, shining a light on where Jewish religious thought in the United States currently stands—and where it may be heading in future generations.

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Offers an examination of the rhetorical linkage of queer theory in the academy with street-level queer activism in the 1980s and early 1990s. Erin Rand examines both queer activist and academic practices during this period, taking as her primary object the rhetorical linkage of queer theory in the academy with street-level queer activism.

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Presents a high-spirited revision of the US Navy's commitment to high-steam propulsion systems, the mainstay of its World War II fleets. Tyler Pitrof's research persuasively demonstrates that in its war against the Imperial Japanese Navy, the US Navy succeeded despite its high-steam propulsion systems rather than because of them.

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Offers a rhetorical examination of the rise of populist conservatism. This volume examines a variety of texts - ranging from speeches and campaign advertisements to news reports and political pamphlets - to outline the populist character of conservatism in the United States.

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The remarkable story of a North Carolina Cherokee community who avoided forced removal on the Trail of Tears. During the 1838 forced Cherokee removal by the US government, a number of close-knit Cherokee communities in the Southern Appalachian Mountains refused to relinquish their homelands, towns, and way of life. Using a variety of tactics, hundreds of Cherokees avoided the encroaching US Army and remained in the region. In his book Their Determination to Remain: A Cherokee Community’s Resistance to the Trail of Tears in North Carolina, Lance Greene explores the lives of wealthy plantation owners Betty and John Welch who lived on the southwestern edge of the Cherokee Nation. John was Cherokee and Betty was White. Although few Cherokees in the region participated in slavery, the Welches held nine African Americans in bondage. During removal, the Welches assisted roughly 100 Cherokees hiding in the steep mountains. Afterward, they provided land for these Cherokees to rebuild a new community, Welch’s Town. Betty became a wealthy and powerful plantation mistress because her husband could no longer own land. Members of Welch’s Town experienced a transitional period in which they had no formal tribal government or clear citizenship yet felt secure enough to reestablish a townhouse, stickball fields, and dance grounds. Greene’s innovative study uses an interdisciplinary approach, incorporating historical narrative and archaeological data, to examine how and why the Welches and members of Welch’s Town avoided expulsion and reestablished their ways of life in the midst of a growing White population who resented a continued Cherokee presence. The Welch strategy included Betty’s leadership in demonstrating outwardly their participation in modern Western lifestyles, including enslavement, as John maintained a hidden space—within the boundaries of their land—for the continuation of traditional Cherokee cultural practices. Their Determination to Remain explores the complexities of race and gender in this region of the antebellum South and the real impacts of racism on the community.

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American Examples: New Conversations about Religion, Volume Three, is the third in a series of annual anthologies produced by the American Examples workshop hosted by the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama. In the latest volume from this innovative academic project, ten topically and methodologically diverse scholars vividly reimagine the meaning and applications of American religious history. These ten chapters use case studies from America, broadly conceived, to ask trenchant theoretical questions that are of interest to scholars and students within and beyond the subfield of American religious history.

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The literary establishment tends to regard Bob Dylan as an intriguing, if baffling, outsider. That changed overnight when Dylan was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, challenging us to think of him as an integral part of our national and international literary heritage. No One to Meet: Imitation and Originality in the Songs of Bob Dylan places Dylan the artist within a long tradition of literary production and offers an innovative way of understanding his unique, and often controversial, methods of composition. In lucid prose, Raphael Falco demonstrates the similarity between what Renaissance writers called imitatio and the way Dylan borrows, digests, and transforms traditional songs. Although Dylan’s lyrical postures might suggest a post-Romantic, “avant-garde” consciousness, No One to Meet shows that Dylan’s creative process borrows from and creatively expands the methods used by classical and Renaissance authors. Drawing on numerous examples, including Dylan’s previously unseen manuscript excerpts and archival materials, Raphael Falco illuminates how the ancient process of poetic imitation, handed down from Greco-Roman antiquity, allows us to make sense of Dylan’s musical and lyrical technique. By placing Dylan firmly in the context of an age-old poetic practice, No One to Meet deepens our appreciation of Dylan’s songs and allows us to celebrate him as what he truly is: a great writer.

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Traces historical developments in physiology, ecology, behavior, and evolutionary biology during the decades following World War II. If natural selection constitutes the first law of biology, supporters claim that homeostasis is a second law, equally important and closely related to the first. Such claims notwithstanding, homeostasis has generated a series of controversies since it was formalized by Walter Cannon in the late 1920s. Critics contended that Cannon took a too optimistic view of life, ignoring not only pathological deviations from normality, but also failing to adequately explain the ability of living things to respond adaptively to environmental challenges. Underlying these controversies was the unresolved problem of integrating physiology and other areas of functional biology with the emerging evolutionary synthesis of Mendelian genetics and Darwinian natural selection. The physiological idea of homeostasis as the adaptive “fit” between the organism and its environment and the Darwinian idea of adaptation and fitness in terms of reproductive success might seem to be complementary in an unproblematic way, but historically they have had an uneasy relationship.Life Out of Balance focuses on a period in history when new ideas of self-regulation, adaptation, and fitness became central to a variety of biological disciplines. During the decades surrounding World War II, these ideas developed in several quite different contexts and led to greater debates about the merits of such models as applied to larger systems, including society at large. Particularly in its later cybernetic form homeostasis seemed to provide new ways of discussing balance and regulation that avoided discredited approaches of earlier champions of vitalism and mechanism. It provided a common perspective and terminology for discussing self-regulating “systems” whether mechanical, biological, or social. Although enormously fruitful and influential, homeostatic perspectives also generated numerous controversies when critics questioned the degree to which biological systems are characterized by balance and self-regulation. Resolving these controversies continues to be a challenge in modern biology.

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An in-depth political study of Alabama's government during the Civil War. Alabama's military forces were fierce and dedicated combatants for the Confederate cause. In his new study of Alabama during the Civil War, Ben H. Severance argues that Alabama's electoral and political attitudes were, in their own way, just as unified in their support for the cause of southern independence. To be sure, the civilian populace often expressed unease about the conflict, as did a good many of its legislators, but the majority of government officials and military personnel displayed pronounced patriotism and a consistent willingness to accept a total war approach in pursuit of their new nation's aims; as Severance puts it, Alabama was a 'war state all over.' In his innovative study, Severance examines the state's political leadership at every level of governance - congressional, gubernatorial, and legislative - and orients much of its analysis around the state elections of 1863. Coming at the war's midpoint, these elections provide an invaluable gauge of popular support for Alabama's role in the Civil War, particularly at a time when the military situation for Confederate forces was looking bleak. The results do not necessarily reflect a society that was unreservedly prowar, but they clearly establish a polity that was committed to an unconditional Confederate victory, in spite of the probable costs. A War State All Over: Alabama Politics and the Confederate Cause focuses on the martial character of Alabama's polity while simultaneously acknowledging the widespread angst of Alabama's larger culture and society. In doing so, it puts a human face on the election returns by providing detailed character sketches of the principal candidates that illuminate both their outlook on the war and their role in shaping policy.

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A definitive analysis of the most successful tribute system in the Americas as applied to Afromexicans.During the eighteenth century, hundreds of thousands of free descendants of Africans in Mexico faced a highly specific obligation to the Spanish crown, a tax based on their genealogy and status. This royal tribute symbolized imperial loyalties and social hierarchies. As the number of free people of color soared, this tax became a reliable source of revenue for the crown as well as a signal that colonial officials and ordinary people referenced to define and debate the nature of blackness.Taxing Blackness:Free Afromexican Tribute in Bourbon New Spain examines the experiences of Afromexicans and this tribute to explore the meanings of race, political loyalty, and legal privileges within the Spanish colonial regime. Norah L. A. Gharala focuses on both the mechanisms officials used to define the status of free people of African descent and the responses of free Afromexicans to these categories and strategies. This study spans the eighteenth century and focuses on a single institution to offer readers a closer look at the place of Afromexican individuals in Bourbon New Spain, which was the most profitable and populous colony of the Spanish Atlantic.As taxable subjects, many Afromexicans were deeply connected to the colonial regime and ongoing debates about how taxpayers should be defined, whether in terms of reputation or physical appearance. Gharala shows the profound ambivalence, and often hostility, that free people of African descent faced as they navigated a regime that simultaneously labeled them sources of tax revenue and dangerous vagabonds. Some free Afromexicans paid tribute to affirm their belonging and community ties. Others contested what they saw as a shameful imposition that could harm their families for generations. The microhistory includes numerous anecdotes from specific cases and people, bringing their history alive, resulting in a wealth of rural and urban, gender, and family insight.

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Fresh perspectives on the implications of gender and race in US military history from a diverse group of scholars in the field of war and society.

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Celebrates more than fifty years of archaeological research from the University of South Alabama.

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Presents essays that fuse literary scholarship and personal travelogue to explore American identity. This volume explores a two-part question: what does travel teach us about literature, and how can reading guide us to a deeper understanding of place and identity?

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For the thirtieth volume of Theatre Symposium, the editors return to a topic first proposed over twenty years ago in volume 9 (theatre and politics in the twentieth century), reimaged for a broader, more comprehensive time frame. In this volume on theater and politics, scholars explore what constitutes the political, how the political is performed, and how theatre engages with politics over time, drawing on the following framing questions: What is the historical and ongoing role of theatre in framing our ideas and conversations about politics? How do politics and theatre engage one another in an increasingly mediated landscape? From theatrical analysis of the political arena to political analysis of the theatrical stage, discussions of theatre and politics can challenge ethical, theoretical, and artistic considerations of our world. The current moment presents a compelling opportunity to revisit, revise, and reengage. Certainly, in the twenty-one volumes since volume 9, the political landscape both nationally and internationally has shifted dramatically. The past two years specifically have seen an increase in the already prevalent presence of the political in our daily discourse. The COVID-19 global pandemic and ongoing racial reckonings have further unmoored many systems and structures, requiring action and change. Rather than a moment of pause or passivity, pandemic times have seen an increase in political activity and political discourse on the local, national, and global levels. Within the theatre and performance communities, these calls to action have resulted in movements like #weseeyouWAT and other calls to break down old systems and create new ones, to privilege access for those of the global majority, and to explicitly demand advocacy and activism. Organizations like the Southeastern Theatre Conference (SETC) itself crafted new ethos statements and engaged in the necessary work of boldly foregrounding equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility at the center of all its efforts. The editors and contributors to this volume respond to the immediacy of this moment and the clarion call for change. From Shakespeare to new productions like Alabama Love Stories, presented at Auburn University, contributors grapple with a range of examples, contemporary and historical, and argue with renewed urgency for the importance of intentionally interrogating the interplay of performance and politics. The essays in this volume demonstrate that theatre and performance cannot rise to this moment or even begin to address it without doing that substantial work to clean its own house and create accessible new spaces.Contributors Chase Bringardner / Tessa Carr / Lily Climenhaga / Abena Foreman-Trice / Emma Givens / TK Manwill / Boomie Pederson / Royal ShirÉe / Teresa Simone / Tony Tambasco / Jonathon W. Taylor / Justice von Maur / Patricia Ybarra

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A narrative microhistory of the Field Museum of Natural History's groundbreaking expedition to hunt and preserve rare African animal specimens for its collection before it went extinct due to modern progress and natural selection, a common view among natural historians as the 1800s came to a close.

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A career-spanning collection of essays from a leading scholar of avant-garde poetry Writing into the Future: New American Poetries from “The Dial” to the Digital collects Alan Golding’s essays on the futures (past and present) of poetry and poetics. Throughout the 13 essays gathered in this collection, Golding skillfully joins literary critique with a concern for history and a sociological inquiry into the creation of poetry. In Golding’s view, these are not disparate or even entirely distinct critical tasks. He is able to fruitfully interrogate canons and traditions, both on the page and in the politics of text, culture, and institution. A central thread running through the chapters is a longstanding interest in how various versions of the “new” have been constructed, received, extended, recycled, resisted, and reanimated in American poetry since modernism. To chart the new, Golding contends with both the production and the reception of poetry, in addition to analyzing the poems themselves. In a generally chronological order, Golding reconsiders the meaning for contemporary poets of high modernists like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, as well as the influential poetry venues The Dial and The Little Review, where less prominent but still vital poets contested what should come “next.” Subsequent essays track that contestation through The New American Poetry and later anthologies. Mid-century major figures like Robert Creeley and George Oppen are discussed in their shared concern for the serial poem. Golding’s essays bring us all the way back to the present of the poetic future, with writing on active poets like Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Susan Howe, and Bruce Andrews and on the anticipation of digital poetics in the material texts of Language writing. Golding charts the work of defining poetry’s future and how we rewrite the past for an unfolding present.

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Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White is an arresting and moving personal story about childhood, race, and identity in the American South, rendered in stunning illustrations by the author, Lila Quintero Weaver. In 1961, when Lila was five, she and her family emigrated from Buenos Aires, Argentina, to Marion, Alabama, in the heart of Alabama's Black Belt. As educated, middle-class Latino immigrants in a region that was defined by segregation, the Quinteros occupied a privileged vantage from which to view the racially charged culture they inhabited. Weaver and her family were firsthand witnesses to key moments in the civil rights movement. But Darkroom is her personal story as well: chronicling what it was like being a Latina girl in the Jim Crow South, struggling to understand both a foreign country and the horrors of our nation's race relations. Weaver, who was neither black nor white, observed very early on the inequalities in the American culture, with its blonde and blue-eyed feminine ideal. Throughout her life, Lila has struggled to find her place in this society and fought against the discrimination around her.

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From utilitarian arrowheads to beautiful stone effigy pipes to ornately-carved shell disks, the photographs and drawings in Sun Circles and Human Hands present the archaeological record of the art and native crafts of the prehistoric southeastern Indians. Painstakingly compiled in the 1950s by two sisters who traveled the eastern United States interviewing archaeologists and collectors and visiting the major repositories, Sun Circles and Human Hands is remarkable for its breadth of illustration of Indian-made artifacts and its comprehensive documentation. Although research over the last 50 years has disproven many of the early theories reported in the text - which were not the editors' theories but those of the archaeologists of the day - the excellent illustrations of objects no longer available for examination have more than validated the lasting worth of this popular book. Broadly acclaimed when it first appeared, this new printing has the added value of Knight's foreword, which places the work in its proper context. Useful to museums, state and national parks, school libraries, gift stores, archaeological agencies, and private collections, Sun Circles and Human Hands is a rich pictorial survey accessible to anyone interested in early American Indian culture.

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When Dr. Martin Luther King arrived in Selma, Alabama, in January, 1965 to organize peaceful demonstrations against discriminatory voting, Sheyann Webb was aged eight and Rachel West Nelson aged nine. This is their account of the events of the winter of 1965 which changed American history.

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Enter a world where time stands still and summer never ends. In the enchanted town of Tannery Bay, it’s July 37, and then July 2 again, but the year is a mystery. Trapped in an eternal loop, the residents embark on an extraordinary journey of self-discovery, unity, and defiance against the forces that seek to divide them. Otis and Joy, intrepid siblings, work with their family and friends to oppose a formidable adversary: The Owners. These cunning and ruthless old men, driven by insatiable greed, hold the town hostage, exploiting its resources and dividing its people. In this powerful #OwnVoices narrative, Tannery Bay is a captivating tale of Black Joy and Queer Joy and the ways in which family is both biological and chosen, where love transcends boundaries, and where art is a vehicle for change.

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Both an exorcism of contemporary academia and a comedic portrait of an artist seeking the means to survive At once angry and jubilant, Ray Levy’s School is a curse on life in a dying university system and an incantation for transforming the material of one’s academic humbling into a vessel for capacious, creative selfhood. The novel incorporates a variety of forms, including a dissertation manuscript possessed by the spirit of Marquis de Sade, a lecture on psychoanalysis delivered as stand-up comedy by a dysphoric graduate student, a review of a found-footage horror movie that’s also a YouTube video of a conference presentation on French theory, an interview with an avant-garde filmmaker that’s really an invocation for conjuring your demon brother, and more. The whole functions as a caustic ritual. School overshares and withholds, cites and dÉtournÉs, chants and channels as it invokes the dead fathers of deconstruction for the black mass that occurs painfully and parodically across the pages. A hand-biting tale, one that chews off the finger instead of kissing the ring, School is a deeply unprofessional book about intellectual professions with reference to endless debt and neoliberalization, coercive seduction rites and fetishizations of authority, and the realization of a life in which you have not lost—and, yes, you deserve the full horizon of possibility.

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Synthesizes the archaeology of the Apalachicola-lower Chattahoochee Valley region of northwest Florida, southeast Alabama, and southwest Georgia, from 1,300 years ago to recent times.

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Argues that nineteenth-century German Jews of all persuasions actively sought acceptance within German society and aspired to achieve full emancipation from the many legal strictures on their status as citizens and residents.

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The 1935 autobiography of Alexander Ziskind Gurwitz, an Orthodox Jew whose lively recounting of his life in Tsarist Russia and his immigration to San Antonio, Texas, in 1910 captures turbulent changes in early twentieth-century Jewish history In 1910, at the age of fifty-one, Alexander Ziskind Gurwitz made the bold decision to emigrate with his wife and four children from southeastern Ukraine in Tsarist Russia to begin a new life in Texas. In 1935, in his seventies, Gurwitz composed a retrospective autobiography, Memories of Two Generations, that recounts his personal story both of the rich history of the lost Jewish world of Eastern Europe and of the rambunctious development of frontier Jewish communities in the United States. In both Europe and America, Gurwitz inhabited an almost exclusively Jewish world. As a boy, he studied in traditional yeshivas and earned a living as a Hebrew language teacher and kosher butcher. Widely travelled, Gurwitz recalls with wit and insight daily life in European shtetls, providing perceptive and informative comments about Jewish religion, history, politics, and social customs. Among the book’s most notable features is his first-hand, insider’s account of the yearly Jewish holiday cycle as it was observed in the nineteenth century, described as he experienced it as a child. Gurwitz’s account of his arrival in Texas forms a cornerstone record of the Galveston Immigration Movement; this memoir represents the only complete narrative of that migration from an immigrant’s point of view. Gurwitz’s descriptions about the development of a thriving Orthodox community in San Antonio provide an important and unique primary source about a facet of American Jewish life that is not widely known. Gurwitz wrote his memoir in his preferred Yiddish, and this translation into English by Rabbi Amram Prero captures the lyrical style of the original. Scholar and author Bryan Edward Stone’s special introduction and illuminating footnotes round out a superb edition that offers much to experts and general readers alike.

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Explores how American Indian artists have responded to the pervasive misunderstanding of indigenous peoples as cultural minorities in the United States and Canada Contemporary indigenous peoples in North America confront a unique predicament. While they are reclaiming their historic status as sovereign nations, mainstream popular culture continues to depict them as cultural minorities similar to other ethnic Americans. These depictions of indigenous peoples as “Native Americans” complete the broader narrative of America as a refuge to the world’s immigrants and a home to contemporary multicultural democracies, such as the United States and Canada. But they fundamentally misrepresent indigenous peoples, whose American history has been not of immigration but of colonization. Monika Siebert’s Indians Playing Indian first identifies this phenomenon as multicultural misrecognition, explains its sources in North American colonial history and in the political mandates of multiculturalism, and describes its consequences for contemporary indigenous cultural production. It then explores the responses of indigenous artists who take advantage of the ongoing popular interest in Native American culture and art while offering narratives of the political histories of their nations in order to resist multicultural incorporation. Each chapter of Indians Playing Indian showcases a different medium of contemporary indigenous art—museum exhibition, cinema, digital fine art, sculpture, multimedia installation, and literary fiction—and explores specific rhetorical strategies artists deploy to forestall multicultural misrecognition and recover political meanings of indigeneity. The sites and artists discussed include the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC; filmmakers at Inuit Isuma Productions; digital artists/photographers Dugan Aguilar, Pamela Shields, and Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie; sculptor Jimmie Durham; and novelist LeAnne Howe.

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A critical analysis of the poetic representations and legacies of five landmark blues artistsThe Blues Muse: Race, Gender, and Musical Celebrity in American Poetry focuses on five key blues musicians and singers—Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Robert Johnson, and Lead Belly—and traces the ways in which these artists and their personas have been invoked and developed throughout American poetry. This study spans nearly one hundred years of literary and musical history, from the New Negro Renaissance to the present. Emily Ruth Rutter not only examines blues musicians as literary touchstones or poetic devices, but also investigates the relationship between poetic constructions of blues icons and shifting discourses of race and gender. Rutter’s nuanced analysis is clear, compelling, and rich in critical assessments of these writers’ portraits of the musical artists, attending to their strategies and oversights.

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The greatest shipwreck disaster in the history of the Cayman Islands. The story has been passed through generations for over two centuries. Details vary depending on who is doing the telling, but all refer to this momentous maritime event as the Wreck of the Ten Sail. Sometimes misunderstood as the loss of a single ship, it was in fact the wreck of ten vessels at once, comprising one of the most dramatic maritime disasters in all of Caribbean naval history. Surviving historical documents and the remains of the wrecked ships in the sea confirm that the narrative is more than folklore. It is a legend based on a historical event in which HMS Convert, formerly L'Inconstante, a recent prize from the French, and 9 of her 58-ship merchant convoy sailing from Jamaica to Britain, wrecked on the jagged eastern reefs of Grand Cayman in 1794. The incident has historical significance far beyond the boundaries of the Cayman Islands. It is tied to British and French history during the French Revolution, when these and other European nations were competing for military and commercial dominance around the globe. The Wreck of the Ten Sail attests to the worldwide distribution of European war and trade at the close of the eighteenth century. In Cayman's 1794 Wreck of the Ten Sail: Peace, War, and Peril in the Caribbean, Margaret E. Leshikar-Denton focuses on the ships, the people, and the wreck itself to define their place in Caymanian, Caribbean, and European history. This well-researched volume weaves together rich oral folklore accounts, invaluable supporting documents found in archives in the United Kingdom, Jamaica, and France, and tangible evidence of the disaster from archaeological sites on the reefs of the East End.

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Investigates the rhetorical practices that contemporary evangelical Christian women use to confront theological and cultural issues that stymie deliberation within their communities regarding how to respond to sexual assault and domestic violence, with an eye toward both compassion for victims and accountability for perpetrators.

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Traces the roots of ideologies and outlooks that shape Jewish life in Israel and the United States today.Zionism and the Melting Pot pivots away from commonplace accounts of the origins of Jewish politics and focuses on the ongoing activities of actors instrumental in the theological, political, diplomatic, and philanthropic networks that enabled the establishment of new Jewish communities in Palestine and the United States. M. M. Silver's innovative new study highlights the grassroots nature of these actors and their efforts - preaching, fundraising, emigration campaigns, and mutual aid organizations - and argues that these activities were not fundamentally ideological in nature but instead grew organically from traditional Judaic customs, values, and community mores. Silver examines events in three key locales - Ottoman Palestine, czarist Russia and the United States - during a period from the early 1870s to a few years before World War I. This era which was defined by the rise of new forms of anti-Semitism and by mass Jewish migration, ended with institutional and artistic expressions of new perspectives on Zionism and American Jewish communal life. Within this timeframe, Silver demonstrates, Jewish ideologies arose somewhat amorphously, without clear agendas; they then evolved as attempts to influence the character, pace, and geographical coordinates of the modernization of East European Jews, particularly in, or from, Russia's czarist empire. Unique in his multidisciplinary approach, Silver combines political and diplomatic history, literary analysis, biography, and organizational history. Chapters switch successively from the Zionist context, both in the czarist and Ottoman empires, to the United States' melting-pot milieu. More than half of the figures discussed are sermonizers, emissaries, pioneers, or writers unknown to most readers. And for well-known figures like Theodor Herzl or Emma Lazarus, Silver's analysis typically relates to texts and episodes that are not covered in extant scholarship. By uncovering the foundations of Zionism - the Jewish nationalist ideology that became organized formally as a political movement - and of melting-pot theories of Jewish integration in the United States, Zionism and the Melting Pot breaks ample new ground.

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An exploration of the moral and ethical implications of new biotechnologies. Many of the ethical issues raised by new technologies have not been widely examined, discussed, or indeed settled. For example, robotics technology challenges the notion of personhood. Should a robot, capable of making what humans would call ethical decisions, be held responsible for those decisions and the resultant actions? Should society reward and punish robots in the same way that it does humans? Likewise, issues of safety, environmental concerns, and distributive justice arise with the increasing acceptance of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in food production nanotechnology in engineering and medicine, and human gene therapy and enhancement. The problem of dual-use—when a technology can be used both to benefit and to harm—exists with virtually all new technologies but is central in the context of emerging 21st century technologies ranging from artificial intelligence and robotics to human gene-editing and brain-computer interfacing. In Re-Creating Nature: Science, Technology, and Human Values in the Twenty-First Century, James T. Bradley addresses emerging biotechnologies with prodigious potential to benefit humankind but that are also fraught with ethical consequences. Some actually possess the power to directly alter the evolution of life on earth including human. Specifically, these topics include stem cells, synthetic biology, GMOs in agriculture, nanotechnology, bioterrorism, CRISPR gene-editing technology, three-parent babies, robotics and roboethics, artificial intelligence, and human brain research and neurotechnologies. Offering clear explanations of these various technologies, a pragmatic presentation of the conundrums involved, and questions that illuminate hypothetical situations, Bradley guides discussions of these and other thorny issues resulting from the development of new biotechnologies. He also highlights the responsibilities of scientists to conduct research in an ethical manner and the responsibilities of nonscientists to become ""science literate"" in the twenty-first century.

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In ""Eastern Cherokee Fishing"", life histories, folktales, and reminiscences about fish gathered from interviews with Cherokee and non-Cherokee people provide a clear and personal picture of the changes in the Qualla Boundary (Eastern Band of the) Cherokee in the last 75 years. Coupled with documentary research, these ethnographic histories illuminate changes in the language, culture, and environment (particularly, aquatic resources) since contact with Europeans and examine the role these changes have played in the traditions and lives of the contemporary Cherokees. Interviewees include a great range of informants, from native speakers of Cherokee with extensive knowledge of traditional fishing methods to Euro-American English speakers whose families have lived in North Carolina for many generations and know about contemporary fishing practices in the area. The topic of fishing thus offers perspective on the Cherokee language, the vigor of the Cherokee system of native knowledge, and the history of the relationship between Cherokee people and the local environment. Heidi Altman also examines the role of fishing as a tourist enterprise and how fishing practices affect tribal waters.

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Schooling Readers investigates the fascinating intersection of two American passions: education and literature. Allison Speicher introduces readers to the common school narrative, an immensely popular genre of fiction set in the rural one-room school in the nineteenth century, though often now forgotten.Despite hailing from different regions with diverse histories and cultures, authors in all parts of the US produced remarkably similar school fictions. These stories, rather than offering idealized depictions of earnest schoolchildren in humble, rough-hewn schoolhouses, expose common schools as sites of both community bonding and social strife. These stories, Speicher shows, reflect surprisingly contemporary problems like school violence and apprehensions about assessments.In four insightful sections, Speicher illuminates the plotlines that define the common school narrative: school exhibitions, in which common schools were opened to the public for a day of student performances; romances between teachers and students; violence against teachers; and teachers adopting their students. She offers rich examples from one hundred and thirty school stories by well-known authors such as Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and Edward Eggleston, as well as by educational reform pioneers such as C. W. Bardeen and long-forgotten contributors to nineteenth-century magazines.By reading these fictions alongside the discourse of reformers like Horace Mann, Speicher illustrates the utility of fiction for uncovering the diverse reactions nineteenth-century Americans had to the expansion of public education as well as the role fiction played in shaping these responses. Throughout she maintains a dual focus, drawing on both literary and educational history, thereby offering much of value to those interested in either field.

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Contemporary reports from prisoners and witnesses humanize the grim realities of the POW camps. Perhaps no topic is more heated, and the sources more tendentious, than that of Civil War prisons and the treatment of prisoners of war (POWs). Partisans of each side, then and now, have vilified the other for maltreatment of their POWs, while seeking to excuse their own distressing record of prisoner of war camp mismanagement, brutality, and incompetence. It is only recently that historians have turned their attention to this contentious topic in an attempt to sort the wheat of truth from the chaff of partisan rancor. Roger Pickenpaugh has previously studied a Union prison camp in careful detail (Camp Chase) and now turns his attention to the Union record in its entirety, to investigate variations between camps and overall prison policy and to determine as nearly as possible what actually happened in the admittedly over-crowded, under-supplied, and poorly-administered camps. He also attempts to determine what conditions resulted from conscious government policy or were the product of local officials and situations.

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